My main requirement is that it should work on a Basic_A0 sized Azure VM instance ((0.25 cores, 0.75 GB memory), so that it's doesn't eat into my monthly MSDN subscription budget. The normal ubuntu-desktop is just too big, but I found people saying that xfce is pretty light.

Secondly, it needed to work with xrdp. The RDP requirement comes from years of using VNC and such tools in the past, and I have to say nothing beats RDP for remote networking. End of.